This specification relates to speech recognition and speech understanding systems.
Speech recognition and speech processing systems are prevalent in many consumer electronic devices. Many of these electronic devices now utilize speech command processing techniques to invoke and perform particular operations. For example, a user device, such as a smart phone, can process speech commands to perform specified operations that include searching the web, setting an alarm, calling a particular person, and so on.
A user device uses a speech recognition processing system to recognize and process speech commands. A provider of the speech recognition and processing system develops parsing rules for various commands a user will speak. Upon a successful parse of a command input by a rule, an action associated with the rule is performed (or may be performed subject to user confirmation). Parsing rules specify particular entity types, such as person names, business names, locations, and so on. There are, however, a very large number of instances of each entity type. For example, there are millions of person names, and millions of business names, and new instances emerge each day.